Media culture
In cultural studies, media culture refers to the current Western capitalist society that emerged and developed from the 20th century, under the influence of mass media. The term alludes to the overall impact and intellectual guidance exerted by the media (primarily TV, but also the press, radio and cinema), not only on public opinion but also on tastes and values. The alternative term mass culture conveys the idea that such culture emerges spontaneously from the masses themselves, like popular art did before the 20th century.Adorno (1963) quotation: The expression media culture, on the other hand, conveys the idea that such culture is the product of the mass media. Another alternative term for media culture is "image culture."Jansson (2002)Thoman (1992) Media culture, with its declinations of advertising and public relations, is often considered as a system centered on the manipulation of the mass of society. Corporate media "are used primarily to represent and reproduce dominant ideologies."Nomai (2008) pp.5, 41 Prominent in the development of this perspective has been the word of Theodor Adorno since the 1940s.Bignell (2007) pp.21-2 Media culture is associated with consumerism, and in this sense called alternatively "consumer culture."Thomas (2012) p.30 quotation: Definitions .}} The news media mines the work of scientists and scholars and conveys it to the general public, often emphasizing elements that have inherent appeal or the power to amaze. For instance, giant pandas (a species in remote Chinese woodlands) have become well-known items of popular culture; parasitic worms, though of greater practical importance, have not. Both scholarly facts and news stories get modified through popular transmission, often to the point of outright falsehoods. Hannah Arendt's 1961 essay "The Crisis in Culture" suggested that a "market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment." Susan Sontag argues that in our culture, the most "...intelligible, persuasive values are increasingly drawn from the entertainment industries", which has spelt the "undermining of standards of seriousness." As a result, "tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel" topics are becoming the norm. Some critics argue that popular culture is "dumbing down": "newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed young ladies... television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other "lifestyle" programmes and reality TV and asinine soaps," to the point that people are constantly immersed in trivia about celebrity culture. According to Altheide and Snow, media culture means that within a culture, the media increasingly influences other institutions (e.g. politics, religion, sports), which become constructed alongside a media logic. Since the 1950s, television has been the main medium for molding public opinion.Diggs-Brown, Barbara (2011) [https://books.google.com/books?id=7c0ycySng4YC&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53 Strategic Public Relations: Audience Focused Practice] p.48 In Rosenberg and White's book Mass Culture, Dwight Macdonald argues that "Popular culture is a debased, trivial culture that voids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple spontaneous pleasures... The masses, debauched by several generations of this sort of thing, in turn come to demand trivial and comfortable cultural products." Van den Haag argues that "all mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and though appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from the reality and from themselves."Van den Haag, in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Mass Culture, p. 529. Critics have lamented the "replacement of high art and authentic folk culture by tasteless industrialised artefacts produced on a mass scale in order to satisfy the lowest common denominator." This "mass culture emerged after the Second World War and have led to the concentration of mass-culture power in ever larger global media conglomerates." The popular press decreased the amount of news or information and replaced it with entertainment or titillation that reinforces "fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia, and aggression." Critics of television and film have argued that the quality of TV output has been diluted as stations pursue ratings by focusing on the "glitzy, the superficial, and the popular". In film, "Hollywood culture and values" are increasingly dominating film production in other countries. Hollywood films have changed from creating formulaic films which emphasize "shock-value and superficial thrills" and the use of special effects, with themes that focus on the "basic instincts of aggression, revenge, violence, and greed." The plots "often seem simplistic, a standardized template taken from the shelf, and dialogue is minimal." The "characters are shallow and unconvincing, the dialogue is also simple, unreal, and badly constructed." More recently, scholars turned to the concept of the mediatization of culture to address the various processes through which culture is influenced by the modus operandi of the media. On one hand, the media are cultural institutions and artifacts of their own, on the other hand, other domains have become dependent on the media and their various affordances. Through religion Media culture, in its mass marketing, has been compared to the role of religions in the past. It has been considered as taking the place of the old traditional religions.from Debord (1977) thesis 20: "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion."Debord (1967) thesis 25 on the spectacle and the sacredNomai (2008) p.176 The waves of enthusiasm and fervent exaltation for a given product, a characteristic consumerist phenomenon, has been compared to the "ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism".Debord (1977) Thesis 67from Debord (1977) thesis 132: "The masters who make history their private property, under the protection of myth, possess first of all a private ownership of the mode of illusion: in China and Egypt they long held a monopoly over the immortality of the soul ... The growth of their real historical power goes together with a popularization of the possession of myth and illusion." Conversely, the Catholic Church, the dominant religious institution in the Western world, has been considered retrospectively as an antecedent and sophisticated form of public relations, advertiser and multinational corporation, selling its product to a mass of worshipers/consumers.Ballardini, Bruno (2006) [https://books.google.com/books?id=n1zyAAAACAAJ Gesù lava più bianco. Ovvero come la chiesa inventò il marketing]. Review and excerpts http://www.uaar.it/ateismo/opere/53.html.Ballardini, Bruno (2011) 'Gesù e i saldi di fine stagione. Perché la Chiesa non «vende» più''. Review http://www.uaar.it/ateismo/opere/bruno-ballardini-gesu-saldi-fine-stagione. See also *Advanced capitalism *Agenda-setting theory *Consumer capitalism *Consumtariat *Culture industry *Infotainment *Internet culture *Low culture *Media studies *More popular than Jesus *Popular culture *''The Society of the Spectacle'' Notes References *Adorno (1963) Culture Industry Reconsidered *Bignell, Jonathan (2007) [https://books.google.com/books?id=0lVabD9fYBIC&pg=PA21 Postmodern Media Culture] *Debord (1977) 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977). Online at Library.nothingness.org (accessdate=2011-08-20) *Debord (1994) 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books). Online at Cddc.vt.edu (accessdate=2011-08-20) *Jansson, André (2002) [http://joc.sagepub.com/content/2/1/5.refs The Mediatization of Consumption], Journal of Consumer Culture, March 2002 vol. 2 no. 1 5-31 *Nomai, Afsheen Joseph (2008) [https://books.google.com/books?id=Y4auF2ysN0wC&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5 Culture Jamming: Ideological Struggle and the Possibilities for Social Change]. Free pdf download available. *Thoman, Elizabeth (1992) [http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/rise-image-culture Rise of the Image Culture], in Media & Values, Issue# 57 *Thomas, P. L. (2012) [https://books.google.com/books?id=v76Ksn6vFIIC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30 Ignoring Poverty in the U.S. the Corporate Takeover of Public Education] Further reading *Duncan, Barry (1988). Mass Media and Popular Culture. Toronto, Ont.: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Canada. Category:Media studies Category:Popular culture